How to Secure/Protect Your PC on a Free Wi-Fi or a Hotspot!

Posted by Abbas ||

November 17, 2009 ||

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Free - Wi-fi With almost everyone on the market trying to WOO users by offering free Wi-Fi during the holiday season and even otherwise.

Google, Yahoo, Bing, Granny in the neighbours house who does not know how to configure her Wi-Fi router are all offering free access to internet but sometimes free comes with a higher cost when paid otherwise. It’s important to know how to surf such open hot-spots safely without losing or exposing your identity online.

Following is the list of softwares and techniques one can use to protect your computer against such pitfalls.

First things first:

Unshare all the files and folders that are configured to share the content on your home or office network. If you don’t remember the list of files and folders that are shared over the network you can do one of two things,
- Type \<Your Computer Name> to see all the shared files on your computer and remove sharing from all the files and folders
- Go to Network and Sharing Center in the Control Panel and turn off “Folder Sharing” from under “Sharing and Discovery” section

Install a personal firewall on the computer to know if anyone is trying to gain unauthorized access to the information on your computer.
- ZoneAlaram (free) [link]
- Pc Tools Freewall Plus (free) [link]
- Ashampoo FireWall Free 1.2 (free) [link]
Install VPN for secure browsing. VPN encrypts every bit of information that is sent and received from your computer making it a hack-proof method of browsing on open hotspots.
- Open VPN [link]

Besides the suggestions mentioned above it is also important to make sure you have an updated anti-virus running on your computer and the computer is scanned at least once in 15 days.

I use Kaspersky on my computer and I am pretty happy with it. I’d recommend the same to all our readers. [link]

Hope this helps in securing your information over unsecured Wi-Fi and Hotspots.